Call for Submissions for the Journal of New Music Research Special Issue
on Feedback Musicianship
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/feedback-musicianship/
<https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/feedback-musicianship/>
Guest Editors:
Chris Kiefer, University of Sussex (UK)[email protected]
Dan Overholt, Aalborg University Copenhagen (DK)[email protected]
Submission deadline:20th April 2026
Call for articles:
Feedback Musicianship is an approach to making music, characterised by a
focus on recurrent circulation of signals. The circulation of signals
through an instrument (be they acoustic waves, continuous values,
discrete information or otherwise) leads to complex, nonlinear
behaviours. A musical instrument played in this way has a complex
response to both the external environment, and to the history of its own
internal states. This type of behaviour can be rewarding to engage with
as a player. It can also be challenging to play, but many feedback
musicians would say they are happy to give up conventional levels of
precise/repeatable control, in order to play musical instruments in
alternative ways.
Research in this field goes back to the 1950s, but there has been plenty
of recent activity in the form of Echo’s special issue on Feedback
(Orpheus Institute, 2022), and the AHRC-funded Feedback Musicianship
Network <https://feedback-musicianship.pubpub.org/>, from which this
special issue follows. Feedback musicianship research can be both
radical and disruptive, challenging conventional notions of composition,
performance, sound aesthetics and instrument design. It is also widely
transdisciplinary, drawing on diverse fields of expertise.
Topics might include:
*
Feedback instrument development
*
Musicology of feedback musicianship
*
Software feedback systems, interacting with algorithms for complex
systems, the potential role of feedback in existing software systems
*
Interfacing between modalities in hybrid instrument design -
software / electronic / acoustic materials
*
Cybernetics, complex adaptive systems and dynamical systems
approaches to understanding and designing feedback instruments
*
Composition and performance techniques for feedback instruments,
notating and documenting feedback music
*
New applications of transducer technologies in feedback instruments
*
Embodiment and agency in feedback instrument design
*
Perception and cognition: understanding human experience of playing
feedback instruments
*
Interaction design / HCI: uncontrol, nonlinearities, complex and
adaptive mappings
*
Pedagogy, diffusion and adoption: availability of repertoire /
improvisation, understanding culture around feedback musicianship
*
History of feedback musicianship, organology of feedback music
*
Machine learning systems in feedback musicianship
*
Wider applications of feedback musicianship in other fields
In this special issue of the Journal of New Music Research, we invite
innovative articles that advance our understanding of Feedback
Musicianship. We invite both quantitative and qualitative research from
both practitioner and theoretical perspectives. All papers should follow
rigorous and systematic research methodologies.
If you have queries, please either email the editors or ask on the
Feedback Music mailing list
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A0=FEEDBACKMUSIC
<https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A0=FEEDBACKMUSIC>
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